I haven't been updating my blog as much as I'd like to this past week, partly because of my frustration at my camera (it won't let me upload pictures onto my computer), and partly because the days seem to fly by. There isn't too much exciting news to report anyways: today I had my first meeting with the professor at the Polytechnic University. He gave me a very broad mandate of researching as much as possible on the geology of Bahia, that will be of interest to engineers.

For example, in 2008 in a small city in the interior of Bahia (Lapao), there was a geological event causing a number of cracks and fissures in the town, as well as damage to several houses. This area covers a karstic aquifer formation, in simplified terms, the types of rocks in the area are susceptible to forming underground caves. It's actually quite similar to the geophysics project I worked on in Quebec, where there were large sinkholes forming in the region, in close proximity to houses, and many people were evacuated while the city investigated the causes. I'm expected to work a minimum of two hours a day on this project, and presently it's not remunerated. I've heard from other students that sometimes to start there's no pay, but afterwards the professor manages to find funding. Even then, the average pay for students working part-time at the university is only 300 reais (around 180$) per month.

There is an obvious lack of funding at the university. The good side is that tuition is free for Brazilians who get accepted into the state university and no one pays for their school books (the main method to get the reading material is either illegal downloading or the library), whereas the bad side is that the books at the university are very outdated; 85% are from the 1950-60s, and the few good ones they have are for reference only, so you can't take them out. I really enjoy all of my classes however, and my only complaint is the few teachers who show up late and end their class an hour early without reason. Also, today I discovered the RU (University Restaurant). Before this, I always ate lunch at the Institute of Geosciences (which cost me between 5 - 10 reais a meal), but today I discovered that lunch at the RU costs only 2.50 reais and is an all you can eat buffet which includes juice and dessert! The lineup is pretty long though ...

This last weekend I went to the beach and to the historic part of town called Pelourinho. I would put pictures up, but as I mentioned earlier, my camera is broken.